EA Founder: App Stores Too Crowded, Honeymoon Period Over

In the wake of people proclaiming that publishers are in danger, EA and Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins, has suggested that when it comes to mobile apps stores, there's never been a greater need for assistance in distribution.

"When Apple launched the iPhone, when Facebook launched their app API, when Android and Google Plus followed suit, you started to see all these offers where 'Hey, if you're a developer, just come to me. You don't need a publisher,'" Hawkins stated in an interview with BigWorld Technology.

"I think that honeymoon is ending now because if you have a million apps in an app store, just because your app is in an app store, it doesn't mean it's going to be discovered. So you've got issues about how you're going to bring traffic to it."

Hawkins' Digital Chocolate has been designed with an eye towards solving this issue, and he notes that although digital platforms provide easy opportunities for developers, making the most of those opportunities and getting noticed is more difficult than it has ever been thanks to market saturation.

"I think for developers increasingly, they're going to have to try to then figure out, 'Well how do I get my discovery problem solved?' If they can't finance it themselves, then maybe they need to partner with a publisher that's good at it," he said.

"Retailers in the old days not only solved the distribution problem, they solved the discovery problem," he says. "In the very beginning with iPhone, with Android, with Facebook, they also solved the discovery problem because there wasn't much there. As you got up into the thousands and thousands of things that are there, they're no longer solving the discovery problem."

Hawkins also suggested that the platform holders could be doing more to help things along, with the 30% cut taken by the likes of Google and Apple now something of an "arbitrary" number.

"As you got up into the thousands and thousands of things that are there, they're no longer solving the discovery problem. They don't really in fact deserve 30 percent of the value chain anymore. The 30 percent number is kind of arbitrary. ... That number makes no sense whatsoever anymore."